With their new album Soul Basement are looking into a bright future. „Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow“ was recorded in a completely acoustic environment and presents a collection of eight emotional songs. „These songs are all special in their own way, representing important fragments of my life. There is the time of love, the time of loneliness, the time of joy and smiling, the time of suffering. My songs are all about my own experiences,“ says Fabio Puglisi, Soul Basement’s producer, arranger, composer and lyricist.
Soul Basement started in the late Nineties. After releasing the EPs „Cloudy Days“ (1998) and „Time Is Ours“ (2004), as well as the album „These Days“ (2010) Puglisi kept working with a variety of different musicians: „I play in a jazz trio, but I am also into electronic music.“ The South Italian native and multi-instrumentalist looks back on a profound career in his hometown of Syracuse in Sicily. Today he lives in Zagreb: „I came to Croatia because of love. It is so hard and unsatisfying to keep up a relationship by e-mail and Skype. I thought: I am a musician, I can travel, so I just went and started a new life.“ In Zagreb Puglisi met singer Željka Veverec and the idea for a new direction in Soul Basement was born: „The sound is just piano and vocals. It is new for Soul Basement, usually we play with a whole band.“
The link to the West Coast scene of singers & songwriters is obvious, but also the smooth, jazz and bossa influenced sound of Everything But The Girl immediately comes in mind. Puglisi agrees: „Yes, Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt are one of my biggest inspirations. Also Carole King and Joni Mitchell, maybe some James Taylor and Laura Nyro.“ He also mentions a deeper aspect to the music of Soul Basement: „My music has always been inspired by my inner research and the books I read. Robert M. Pirsig’s ‘Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance’ from 1974 is my most important inspiration. The legendary spiritual masters in the yoga and meditation field or Eastern philosophy writers like Ramana Maharshi are also essential. Plus science-fiction writers like Ray Bradbury or Philipp K. Dick. I follow a very similar path John McLaughlin does since his Mahavishnu times, I am on an continuous spiritual quest and meditate constantly.“
As a lyricist, Puglisi tries to stay true: „For me it is all about connecting my listeners to the story in my songs.“ With the video for their first single „Goodbye My Love“ Soul Basement more than succeeded in creating this connection: „We are so surprised about the many views, in the first week I had a friend who helped spreading the video – now all views coming in are real.“ Other tracks reveal a sense for true-to-life storytelling as well: “’It’s Not You’, for example, is a very particular song, It is about the dilemma in a relationship where you have to decide if you want to stay or go. When decide to go you to go you will miss the other person a lot, and when you decide to stay it will only be suffering and pain. I imagined it from a woman’s point of view:“ Puglisi laughs: „Sometimes I even manage to turn into a woman.“
With „Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow“, Soul Basement arrive at an important point on their musical journey: „ When I started in 1997 I looked for a name,” Fabio Puglisi remembers. “One evening I was listening to ‘Blue Lights In The Basement’ by Roberta Flack, and a flash came through my mind. Why not connect ‘Soul’, my kind of music, with ‘Basement’ as a metaphor for the ongoing effort to have a spiritual grounding to our music? With this album I feel that my idea makes more sense than ever to me and the sound of Soul Basement has found the place where it can rest in itself.“